Ordinary diners who take part in our annual survey each spring review restaurants and leave their feedback, but we also ask them to score restaurants from 1-5 on food, service and ambience. Harden’s then uses an average of these scores and measures them against other establishments in the same price bracket to arrive at the ratings published in the guide and online.

Snippets from some of your feedback may end up in the overall Harden’s review, noticeably they appear in “double quotation marks”. The rest of our pithy, bite-sized restaurant summaries are compiled by analysing the survey data and extracting recurring themes, looking at whether or not a venue was nominated in any of our categories – like ‘favourite’ or ‘most overpriced’ – and, of course, looking at the ratings for food, service and ambience.

The Harden’s ratings indicate that a restaurant is:

exceptional very good good average poor

All reviews are compiled from survey comments and ratings, without any regard for our own personal opinions, except in cases where restaurants are too new to have been included in the survey. If you want the editors’ view on new restaurants in London you can find them in our Editors’ Review section.

News

Jamie’s lacklustre Italian chain shrinks

Jamie Oliver is to close six of his Jamie’s Italian restaurants, his company blaming a “tough market” along with “post-Brexit pressures and unknowns” for the move. Is this one of the first examples of 2017 of under-performing businesses reaching for the Brexit ‘get out of jail free’ card?

The closures are at Ludgate Hill in central London, Aberdeen, Exeter, Cheltenham, Richmond and Tunbridge Wells. The company said it hopes to find alternative jobs for 120 staff affected.

There are currently 46 branches in the UK and another 36 abroad, some of them run by partners. A further 22 are planned to open internationally this year, although expansion in this country is restricted to Oliver’s US-style barbecue brand Barbecoa, with a high-profile London opening on Piccadilly scheduled for next month.

Simon Blagden, chief executive of the Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group, said Jamie’s Italian branches needed to serve 3,000 covers a week to be sustainable, but “our overall business is in very good shape”.

The Jamie’s Italian chain has perennially received a damning report in the Harden’s Survey, and is widely perceived by reporters as a case-study in celeb spin-offs. This year’s 2017 survey suggests you go “only if you are desperate” and that “it’s overly expensive for what’s now very mediocre”.